Reflection Questions: Holocaust Video, Chapter 1

After watching the first chapter of the video of Oprah and Elie Wiesel at Auschwitz, answer the following questions on your own blogs:

1. What details about the Holocaust experience became clearer or more vivid for you because of the video?
After watching Chapter One of the video, I was able to understand more about where the prisoners went and how they were treated. Some of the details that I remember were that there were large amounts of prisoners inside one small cart. Many of the people were not aware of the burning and thought that they were only going to take showers. I also learned about the specifics about how they burned the prisoners with the gas and flames.

2. Describe the video techniques used to tell this story:
[Camera angles
Graphics
Interviewing
Excerpts from the book]
I noticed that the audio was only their voices. Usually, this would not be very good for a documentary because it would make the package “silent” and “boring”. But since they used a lot of pictures of the Holocaust, their voices made the documentary seem so sad and depressing. Whenever they would make references to the book “Night”, they used a “Typewriter text” that I thought made it look neat. A lot of the pictures were moving across the screen slowly rather than quickly to make it seem sad. There were camera pans of the camp in present day and it cross faded into b-roll of the camp in the past, which shows a comparison on present to past.

3.What is the "madness" the Oprah and Elie Wiesel speak of at the end of this section?
I think what they meant by “madness” was “inhumanity”. It was inhumane for them to do that to the prisoners. It was really unnecessary for them to treat them like that and they did not accomplish anything but death, death, and more death.